Tag Archive: mash-ups

A unique space fantasy heroine finds herself aligning with a classic pulp fantasy heroine in Dynamite‘s latest mash-up mini-series, Barbarella/Dejah Thoris, with its first issue arriving in comic book stores today. How exactly do you put together two characters from such different source material? A magic artifact, of course! When Barbarella and Dejah encounter a strange object in their respective worlds, what else can they do but work together to figure out why they are suddenly together, far from their familiar worlds?

Writer Leah Williams and artist Germán Gárcia set up a murder mystery where an alien scientist in Barbarella’s world is killed minutes before an expected meeting with Barbarella. In the series’ first issue, readers will find an evenly split introductory story putting these leads together. One of them isn’t too happy about it. Edgar Rice Burroughs‘ fantasy adventure heroine Dejah Thoris mixed up with the likes of the risqué Barbarella of Jean-Claude Forest 1960s comics may seem like an unlikely pairing, but why not?

We have seen some great team-ups that also served as great mash-ups. One of the best came last year when DC Comics took a side trip with Warner Bros.’ Looney Tunes characters, especially in the Batman/Elmer Fudd crime-noir, one-shot story “Pway for Me,” by Tom King, Lee Weeks, and Lovern Kindzierski. It was our pick for last year’s best team-up/mash-up. This year DC Comics is back, but this time they paired off again with characters from Hanna-Barbera. Last year for DC Meets Hanna-Barbera, Volume 1, that meant pairing Jonny Quest and Adam Strange, Space Ghost and Green Lantern, Flintstones and Booster Gold, and Suicide Squad and Banana Splits. In comic book stores and coming soon in a compilation edition, DC Meets Hanna-Barbera, Volume 2 features even more great team-up/mash-ups: Who wins when you pair The Flash and Speed Buggy? How serious can cartoon characters get when you’ve teamed Black Lightning and Hong Kong Phooey? Or “Super Sons” Robin and Superboy taking on Dynomutt? But the winner is clear… How could you possibly lose with a team-up of Aquaman and Jabberjaw?

With the right amount of seriousness (mainly from Aquaman) and the right amount of nostalgic humor (mainly from fun-loving land shark Jabberjaw), Dan Abnett strikes throwback gold with a story full of seaside quips and Jaws references, pulling ideas even from the classic favorite Superfriends show. The result is one of the best Aquaman stories we’ve read. And Abnett completely tapped into the pulse of the classic Jabberjaw cartoon, tying in his band of friends The Neptunes. Artists Paul Pelletier, Andrew Hennessy, and Rain Beredo created a unique, incredible look, something out of Syfy’s Haven town and Luc Besson’s future world in Valerian and Laureline. THIS is the ongoing series that needs to continue, although, understandably the pairing is a big stretch even for comic books and animated series, bridging time and space to get these two worlds together. But it works. From the setting, a seaside tourist town called Amnesty Bay (playing on the Jaws town of Amity), to the return of the world’s best drumming shark, to the sound of fingers on a chalkboard, to those Rodney Dangerfield meets Curly Howard catch-phrases, to the final entanglement with shark hunters, this one has it all.

DC has already featured Hanna-Barbera together in ongoing comic book series from the favorite characters of 1970s Saturday morning cartoons in the series Future Quest, Scooby Apocalypse, The Flintstones, Wacky Raceland, Dastardly and Muttley, The Ruff and Reddy Show, The Jetsons, and Exit, Stage Left!: the Snagglepuss Chronicles. A great writer should be able to find unlimited potential for Jabberjaw and his friends. Check out these preview pages from the publisher for the story “A Bigger Beat”–

It’s the largest direct to television film yet made, the $90 million new Christmas weekend Netflix-only release Bright. And it’s a welcome addition to the world of mash-ups. It’s a fantasy, action, police procedural. It’s a Will Smith movie and a high-octane Assault on Precinct 13 and Training Day-inspired shoot-’em-up. It’s The Lord of the Rings meets Adam-12. And it’s also like a new film in the Alien Nation series or an episode of the short-lived Syfy series Defiance. The biggest downfall is that the opportunities for new stories within its massive world building merits more than just a one-shot story.

Joel Edgerton is fantastic as an Orc LAPD officer named Nick Jakoby who’s partnered with a human cop named Daryl Ward, played by Will Smith. It’s a parallel world where the past 2,000 years of Earth history have been blended with the trope world of classic high fantasy stories. Evil little fairies annoy and harass and cause mischief. Elves are refined and tend to run everything. Dragons fly unassuming across the night sky. Orcs are the dregs of society and humans are stuck somewhere in the middle. A Bright can be of any race, and federal agents responsible for magic are attempting to make certain a certain evil Bright is not reunited with a magic wand–an event that could return a dark power to annihilate the planet.

When Daryl and Nick pick up a Bright carrying a magic wand, gangs of humans and Orcs will stop at nothing to possess the wand–a rare object that can grant its owner any and every wish. But only a Bright can handle a wand, and like the One Ring from The Hobbit series, the temptation to take the wand is great–too great for some poor saps without self-control. The movie moves into a full-length action chase scene, with Daryl and Nick mirroring the cops in a very similar situation from Alien Nation. And also like Alien Nation, the subtext is a reflection of all of the ills of society.

Star Trek: The Wrath of Khan–a member of that fabled Class of 1982’s “best summer of movies”–turned 35 this year, and to celebrate, the film is returning to theaters as part of the Fathom Events series. It has been said the film’s director and screenplay writer Nicholas Meyer saved Star Trek. Meyer was well-known as the author of the New York Times bestselling novel The Seven-Per-Cent Solution and its screenplay, which earned him an Oscar nomination, and for directing and writing the screenplay for the fan-favorite, time travel thriller, Time After Time. After the lukewarm response at the box office to Star Trek: The Motion Picture, executive producer Harve Bennett tapped Meyer to take the franchise in a bold, new direction, and the result, Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan, became the best reviewed film of the franchise and a classic among all science fiction. Many details about Meyer’s work have been recounted in Allan Asherman’s The Making of Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan and Meyer’s own memoir, The View from the Bridge. Meyer has also shared a trove of his thoughts and work on the film in director commentaries accompanying the film’s various home releases. He’s not quite finished with Star Trek yet–he’s back again as a writer and producer on the new series, Star Trek: Discovery, premiering next month.

I was ecstatic to interview Nicholas Meyer this past week and listen to him reminisce as director and screenwriter of The Wrath of Khan for the approaching anniversary theatrical release, and ask him questions I’ve had for years about his long writing career. Meyer sees himself first as a storyteller. In addition to The Wrath of Khan, he wrote the screenplay for Star Trek IV: The Voyage Home and he directed and wrote the screenplay for Star Trek VI: The Undiscovered Country. I think you’ll discover—or rediscover—that in Meyer’s selections of leading stage and screen actors like Christopher Plummer, Meyer provided gravitas to the Star Trek universe, and by infusing classical literature into the voices of characters from the likes of Shakespeare, Doyle, and Melville, he elevated Star Trek’s story beyond mere popular science fiction. Everything that would come after The Wrath of Khan in the Star Trek franchise exists as a direct result of Meyer’s success on that film.

Director Nicholas Meyer observing final detail work as Ricardo Montalban’s headwrap is applied, filming the first appearance of Khan in Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan.

CB: Welcome to borg.com. Thanks for chatting with me and borg.com readers today and congratulations on the 35th anniversary of Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan.

NM: Thank you so much. It’s a real pleasant surprise—As Kirk said to Scotty, “That’ll be a pleasant surprise.”

CB: Let’s talk about Ricardo Montalban as Khan. I have always loved this line: “I’ll chase him ‘round the Moons of Nibia and ‘round the Antares Maelstrom and ‘round Perdition’s flames.” When you write something like that, do you know that you’ve got it, and when you see Montalban saying it and it appears on the screen, do you get any satisfaction of seeing that all come together?

NM: Absolutely! I have to say, first of all, I didn’t write it. Herman Melville wrote it. I substituted a few planets or something. This is all Ahab. I just cribbed it. I remember with some satisfaction what I took to be at the time my cleverness (which turns out to be the curse of Kirk: “I patted myself on the back for my cleverness”). It wasn’t until I saw Ricardo actually do it that I got goosebumps, and thought, “Holy cow. This is wonderful!” And I said to him actually at some point during the movie, “You really should be playing Lear.” He sort of looks like Lear–with a big set of pecs. Because he has been on stage, he was on Broadway, he did legit plays. He was very touched, I think, that I had told him this, and he made some disparaging remark about his Hispanic accent. I said, “That’s all bullshit. You enunciate perfectly. You could do this.” I think Khan was as close as he ever got to doing it.

Nothing in the past five years has been more fun as far as comic book events are concerned than Dynamite Comics’ ever-growing crossovers incorporating their huge roster of licensed characters. The New 52 and Convergence events from DC Comics and the Secret Wars event from Marvel Comics are so much more of the same–pulling in dozens of titles and character crossovers over the course of several months. All of these publisher events attempt to reinvigorate their brands–to bring more people in to try out the regular monthly series featuring their stock of characters, whether you’re looking at the Avengers or the X-Men or the Justice League. Dynamite’s events also pull from their stock of characters, yet the publisher has managed to unleash something very new in the way these characters come together.

Dynamite’s Masks limited series introduced a pantheon of superheroes from the literary past: Green Hornet and Kato, The Shadow, Miss Fury, Spider, The Lone Ranger, Zorro, the Green Lama, Black Terror and The Black Bat (a second limited monthly follow-on series, Masks 2, is underway now). Then Bill Willingham expanded and amped up the Dynamite characters with his Legenderry steampunk adventures. Another limited series, this one introduced the Six Thousand Dollar Man, teaming up with a parallel world, steampunk era Red Sonja, Zorro, Flash Gordon, Green Hornet, the Phantom, and more. It now has its own expanded event series of sorts with Legenderry universe monthly series featuring each of Vampirella, Red Sonja, and Green Hornet.

But Dynamite’s best crossover event series may have just arrived with writer Gail Simone and artist Sergio Davila’s new Swords of Sorrow. A dark prince has enlisted an arsenal of women warriors to defend his interests, including the well-known red, horned villainess Purgatori. But a mysterious and beautiful otherworld woman called the Traveller has assigned various swords to her own select group of women warriors via the Courier, across time and space–from Everywhere and Everywhen to Nowhen–to defend worlds menaced by this prince. Her heroines include Red Sonja, Vampirella, Irene Adler, Dejah Thoris, Jennifer Blood, Jane Porter, Lady Zorro, Milan Kato, Masquerade, Black Sparrow, Miss Fury, Pantha, Lady Rawhide, and Jana the Jungle Girl.

Leading a select team of women writers in nine Swords of Sorrow tie-in series and one-shots, Gail Simone has her challenges here, required to pull together more than a dozen main characters quickly, explaining enough to let us know who they are for those unfamiliar with them all, and set up enough world-building to let us understand how they all fit together. This may be the best we’ve read of any series from Simone so far, as Issue #1 of the six backbone issues gives us all we need to get excited to see what comes next. Sergio Davila’s artwork is as detailed and interesting as his work on Legenderry, sure to keep us interested to come back for more each month. Check out the full checklist of the crossover series below.

Nothing is more impressive than someone creating an original work that makes you interested in something you were not interested in before. Even better, when someone creates a new mash-up that brings together two concepts that just can’t go together–like Archie, Jughead, Betty, Veronica, Reggie and Sabrina–and zombies. Yet they make it work. A candidate for best single issue comic book this year is Issue #1 of Roberto Aguirre-Sacasa and Francesco Francavilla’s new series Afterlife with Archie.

It’s so wrong, and yet so right. I reader Archie Comics as a kid, but I still haven’t been swept up by the zombie thing… until now. Heavily influenced by the monster comics of Bernie Wrightson, the art in Afterlife with Archie is as good as it gets. Eisner winner Francavilla’s style is entirely his own, and like his Black Beetle series discussed here at borg.com earlier this year, readers are transported to the vision of the past as seen in Golden Age comic books. Even the paper and printing on Issue #1 feels like you’re holding a 1940s comic book in your hands. Francavilla brings together the classic characters of the Archie universe and the creepiness of “how the end of the world begins”.

The Further Adventures of Sherlock Holmes: Sherlock vs. Dracula begins with a schooner that has run aground in a British harbor. Its only cargo is fifty boxes of dirt and its only living passenger a dog. The ship’s captain was tied to the wheel, lifeless, drained of his blood, with two strange puncture wounds on his neck. Enter our intrepid team of Holmes and Watson.